Bought some interesting flowers from Costco but they didn't have the name of the flower, so went online and found it was a Protea flower.
Shot wide open with soft focus. Stripped away some of the outside petals to reveal the insides.
Hi Mike, nice use of the soft focus and wide aperture. It makes the image look like an abstract painting. I do feel that the image needs a point of attention somewhere. There's loads of lines to follow, but my eye doesn't linger anywhere. I do love the colors though!
Very beautiful and artistic photograph! Very good eye to see this one!
I like the soft light and colors. The lines are great, both the ones turning to the left as well as the diagonal lines from bottom left to the upper right.
Mike, you know how much I like these shallow DOF floral images! This one is beautiful but I also felt like Jerry - that nothing was anchoring my eye. I took a long look at it and thought it needed something stronger to balance out the bottom of the frame as the top left is more "heavy" in feel. I deepened the yellows just a bit at the bottom of the frame and then added a little yellow to the right side where the white BG was - it's certainly not better than your original - just different. For me, it helps anchor my eye down at the bottom of the frame a bit more but I also see that it loses some of it's wonderful "airy" quality so not sure that's a good trade off. Thought I'd share it so others could see how a small change to one of their images can affect the whole look and feel...
(I hope you got your wife some flowers for V-day while you were at Costco. No fair re-gifting these!) :D;):D